When Gremlins director
Joe Dante was given carte blanche to make an hour-long film for
the made-for-cable series Masters of Horror, he and
Batman screenwriter Sam Hamm chose to make a political statement
about the Iraq war. Based on Dale Bailey's short story Death and
Suffrage, Homecoming sees soldiers killed in an unnamed
"evil" war rise from their coffins in a bid to vote
out the president who sent them to their deaths for a lie. The
film received a rapturous reception at last year's Turin
Film Festival and has been hotly debated and argued about
on the web.
Were you surprised by
the level of freedom you were given on this?
“Well, no actually.
The series this is part of is not a political series, it’s 13
episodes directed by different horror movie directors, and because
there wasn’t a great deal of money or time, the trade-off was that
we were promised creative freedom to do whatever we wanted. So while
most of the directors took that as a sign that they could push the
envelope for the graphic content of the shows, it seemed to me that
it was an opportunity that I wasn’t going to find anywhere else,
which was I had a whole hour to play with and no one telling me what
to do. So my friend, the screenwriter Sam Hamm [Batman], and I came
up with this idea of doing a piece about the war, which no one else
seemed to be covering dramatically, so we managed to sneak this by
everybody.”
What was the producers’
reaction when you showed them the script?
“Initially we had a
short story called Death and Suffrage, which is a Monkey’s Paw type
story, although the hook in the story is gun control, not the war.
When we submitted that story I think the producers were a little
confused and they didn’t understand how we were going to turn this
into a Masters of Horror episode. But once they read the script they
were completely onboard with it.”
So they had no problem
with the political content at all? The film deals with these issues
more directly than anything else that’s come out of America,
or how we often think these issues are debated in America.
“Well that’s true.
And usually, certainly in the horror movie genre, the messages are
coded. Usually there’s metaphors and symbols, but it seemed to me
that this issue was so strong that it needed to be blunt. So we made
it as obvious as we could make it without naming real names."
Before the opportunity
to do this arose, had you wanted to do something about the war?
"Well I had wanted
to see something done. I don’t know if I wanted necessarily to be
the one to do it. But it just seemed to me that the political
situation here in America is so volatile and so dire that it demanded
some kind of dramatic examination and it just wasn’t getting much.
There have been a couple of movies – Syriana, and Goodnight, and
Good Luck, which is set in the 50s – which sort of grapple around
the edges of these stories, but this big elephant in the room is this
war; people are dying every day and it’s sort of shunted off to a
couple of announcements every day of how many more people are dead,
and otherwise people go on with their lives. That just didn’t seem
right to me.”
There’s been a lot of
press recently about how films like Syriana, Goodnight, and Good
Luck, and Jarhead perhaps herald a return to the overt political
filmmaking of Hollywood in the 70s. Do you think that is
the case? Do you think it’s possible?
“No, it’s not. I
don’t believe that. Jarhead is not a political film. The two George
Clooney pictures [Syriana, Good Night, and Good Luck], I mean he is
one of two people in Hollywood who is really willing to put his money
were his mouth is. His pictures do have a point and they do have an
agenda, and I think that’s great. But for the most part that’s
not considered a safe bet commercially, because obviously you’re
going to offend half the audience. So I don’t see a groundswell of
new political films being made. There is a picture by the Weitz
brothers called American Dreamz, which is a satire, which I
understand has a lot of contemporary relevance, but I haven’t seen
it.”
The Clooney films see
the present through the past. Is that really the only way a studio
could do it, so as to try to not polarise people?
“Well I don’t think
you’re going to find these pictures made by studios. Even when
they’re released by studios they’re usually made by independents,
and I think that that’s really the only viable way to do it. It’s
just not a climate where you’re going to be able to get somebody to
spend $35 million making, you know, an anti-war statement. Those
days, I think, are past.”
So claiming these films
herald a new era in political filmmaking is a bit premature?
“I think so. I’d
like to think I’m wrong but I just don’t see much sign of it.”
You’ve said that if
you want to see what a country is really thinking, look at its horror
films. Is this because they work on an unconscious level?
“Well it seems to be
related to turbulence. Whenever times are rough, people seem to want
to see horror films. Now I don’t know whether the appeal is seeing
someone who has worse problems than you do, or just that there’s a
darkness to the national mood. But you have to keep remembering that
traditionally the audience for horror films is young. Even in the 30s
and 40s, those pictures were made for younger audiences generally.
And I think partly that’s because the idea of risking death and
going on a scary ride is a lot easier when you’re far away from
death, when it’s not staring you in the face. When audiences get
older they tend to be a little bit more circumspect about wanting to
confront death every day. So I think horror movies have been, and
always will be, a young person’s genre. Young males.”
Films like Eli Roth’s
Hostel, which is doing very well in America at the moment, and Rob
Zombies Devil’s Rejects are very extreme as they’re a throwback
to 1970s horror filmmaking.
“Well they’re
progeny of the Chainsaw Massacre. They’ve sprung from that
particular well. There were Hills Have Eyes and Last House on the
Left, in the late 70s and early 80s there were a lot of films like
that; they were gore films but also torture films. I find it
interesting that the rise of movies where people are tortured in
horror films is now sort of a post Abu Ghraib phenomenon.”
I was going to ask
whether you think there is a connection with the events at Abu
Ghraib.
“I think there is.
And you can’t discount the jaded factor that people have now seen
virtually everything that can be done to a human being on screen, and
that’s why Saw, I think, used its premise so cleverly, in that
people had to do the mutilating themselves. There’s always going to
be a market for this kind of thing. And, I think, as long as times
are what they are, you can’t go wrong making a $5 million horror
picture.”
There’s been a
resurgence of zombie movies since 9/11, beginning, really, with 28
Days Later. Why do you think that has happened?
“Well, you know,
these really aren’t zombie movies. Zombie movies began with The
White Zombie in 1932 and they were usually West Indian zombies. They
were dead natives or dead tribesmen who were used in the sugar mills,
and there was kind of a class consciousness sub-plot about all of
those pictures. Frankly, it’s been a pretty maligned genre. There’s
been very few masterpieces, I Walked with a Zombie being one of the
few. But then in 1968, when George Romero made Night of the Living
Dead, which was a ghoul movie, not a zombie movie, the appellation of
zombie started to adhere to the idea of anybody that was a walking
dead person. So as a result with all the Italian imitations of that
picture, we ended up with sort of a new genre, which is the zombies
who aren’t really the original zombies, they’re just somebody who
happens to be alive after being dead. So that has really taken off.
There are many more of those films than there ever were of the West
Indian zombie movies.”
Since Romero especially
these movies have been read as political. Are they or are people just
reading things into them?
“Well it’s a very
malleable genre. Because you’re dealing with blank slates you can
impart whatever motives you want to the zombies and the zombie
masters. You got to remember there’s always zombie masters; zombies
always have to work for somebody or be after somebody. Land of the
Dead, which was not a very successful film here, was widely read as a
political film. Critically it was quite well received but for
whatever reason the audience stayed away.”
Do people want to see
political films?
“I think there are
always people who will appreciate political content in a horror film
but I don’t think that’s the reason why the pictures are
successful. They’re successful because people want to see zombie
movies. 28 Days Later came out and revitalised the genre because they
now moved fast, and some people complained that the reason the Romero
picture didn’t work was because audiences are now used to seeing
fast zombies. They don’t want to see shuffling, slow zombies
anymore. I don’t know how true that is but it could be that the
film was perceived as old fashioned.”
In Matinee you showed
an era in filmmaking coming to an end with the beginning of the Cuban
Missile Crisis. Do you think the current situation will require a new
kind of film to address it, or a stylistic shift?
“No, I don’t think
you’re going to see a lot of imitations of Homecoming. It’s
really a fluke. It’s a fluke that it got made. It happened to come
out at a time when the political situation here is so volatile that
it got a lot of attention that it wouldn’t have ordinarily gotten.
It was first run in Italy at the Turin Film Festival, and the
audience reaction was explosive, they just thought it was the
greatest thing since chopped liver. I have a feeling that it came
from their surprise at seeing any American-backed entertainment that
took this stand. I think they’re so used to not seeing that from
America.”
There’s a lot of
anger in Homecoming but is there also a lot of frustration precisely
because of the way discussion about the war has been squashed?
“I think it’s even
more frustrating in that it’s not just been squashed but that the
majority of the public just doesn’t seem to give a shit. It’s
hard for those of us who came of age in the late 60s and early 70s to
conceive of the public just turning its back, as they did in Germany
in 1933, to what’s going on and saying, ‘You know it’s not my
problem. It’s somebody else’s problem. As long as I get my three
square meals a day and I can fill up my SUV, I don’t care.’
That’s not the country I grew up in. And, I think those of us who
have seen the change, are very disturbed by it.”
Does consumerism have a
lot to do with it? You know, people are just happy with their lot and
don’t really care what’s going on?
“Look, this is the
fattest country in the world. It has more obesity here and more
waste. We use up seventy-odd per cent of the world’s resources on
twenty-five per cent of the population. I mean it’s a pretty
unsustainable model it seems to me, in its current form. Prior
administrations used to just put them on the backburner and think
that they’d deal with it later. The current administration is
actively undoing everything that was ever done ecologically or
politically, and trying to turn the country back into what they think
it should be, which is a model from like the late 40s and early 50s,
which is impossible. It can’t happen. We can’t go back there.
But, nonetheless, we’re currently having hearings, a new Supreme
Court Justice [Samuel Alito] is probably going to get confirmed, and
strike down a number of things that my generation has counted on
legally. These 5-to-4 decisions are now not going to be 5-to-4
decisions anymore, and the tenuous grasp that we’ve had on civil
liberties issues in this country are going to be overturned. There’s
no way around it. These people have the votes, they have the
majority, and they’re going to do it, because that’s been their
goal. This administration didn’t come in with no agenda. Their
agenda was to roll back everything that Roosevelt did and return us,
I guess, to Herbert Hooverland.
“And they’re right
on target. Despite their massive incompetence and their incredible
stupidity they have gambled on the lack of interest in the American
public, I guess, or the easy gullibility of the American public, and
they’re just pushing through with their agenda and there doesn’t
seem to be anybody to stop them.”
Why do you think the
American press was so supine?
“I find it perplexing
and embarrassing. Edward R. Murrow, wherever he is, I’m sure he’s
happy they’re making a movie about him but I can’t think he would
be too happy about what’s going on in this country. The press has
been complicit in this takeover. I think partly it’s because the
right wing were very smart in their moving into the media. Once they
perceived it was a liberal media, they wanted to change that, and
they have now managed to completely overturn that and the media is
now largely conservative. The commentators who are supposedly not
taking sides simply bring up White House talking points at every
turn. It’s as if they’re all reading from the same playbook,
which, of course, they are, because talking points are given out to
right-wing hosts and all that. But when you watch a programme like
Meet the Press, which is supposed to be a bi-partisan programme, and
you see that the moderator is not only involved in the various
scandals that are going on but has actively shilled for the
Republican Party, it’s pretty astonishing. And the fact that people
just sit back and say ‘Oh well, I guess that’s just the way
things are,’ it’s astonishing to me. In my day we tried to do
something about things like this.”
Was there something
quite subversive about the fact that Homecoming was on TV because
that’s where a lot of the manufacturing of consent went on for the
war?
“Well it was on TV
but it was on cable TV, which is not exactly the same as being on TV.
That programme could never be aired on a network. There’s no way.
First of all, in the majority of situations, you have to take notes
from your producers, which we didn’t have to do, but then you have
to go out and run the film at some mall somewhere and get cards from
teenagers, who will complain that everyone in the movie is too old.
We didn’t have to do any of that. As a result it didn’t go
through the filter that all network programmes go through, which is
why it could never have been on network television. Cable television
is a medium people pay for, so you have a somewhat more limited
audience. Showtime has a smaller audience than HBO. But originally
this series was done as a series of DVDs for Anchor Bay, and I think
whatever penetration this is going to make is probably going to come
when the DVDs come out.”
George Clooney has
said Michael Moore polarises people whereas he wanted to bring
people together in debate. You, on the other hand, seem to be very
much in the Michael Moore camp.
“I’m afraid so. I
think what is interesting is that after his movie came out, which you
might recall won a lot of awards overseas -- it’s actually a
terrific piece of propaganda -- he was pretty much
marginalised. He was vilified, as if the things in the movie weren’t
true. You know, you look at the movie today and it’s even more
devastating now than when it was new, because we know more. But that
approach has been effectively marginalised to the point where you
don’t even hear much from Michael Moore anymore. He’s such
a lightning bolt for controversy that people don’t bring him up,
which I think is a shame.”
How did you decide what
to put in and what to leave out, because you seem to be taking on the
Republicans’ crimes and misdemeanours one by one, and with the
recreation of the banned photographs of the coffins at Dover Air
Force Base, their attempts at censorship? With so much to choose
from, was the problem deciding what to leave out?
“Well we were
basically trying to hit as many points as we could in an hour and
still have a story. There was no point in pulling our punches because
we only had an hour. And we wanted to make an impression and get
press, so it couldn’t be a subtle little story that goes by and
people take it to their heart and say, ‘That was a well done little
story.’ This had to be in your face. So it’s a very rude film
that has a lot of satirical stuff in it, and it also has a lot of
images that are very loaded, very powerful. When those soldiers come
out from underneath those flags, it’s a very powerful image. And
we’re not unmindful of how powerful it was.”
What sort of
consideration did you have when you were dealing with the zombies for
the families who have lost sons in Iraq or whose sons are currently
serving out there?
“Since in any horror
film you naturally assume that the monsters are the bad guys, and the
tradition is that when people come back from the dead they want to
kill you, and they’re bad, obviously we had to turn that around,
because these guys are the heroes of the movie. I’m sure it’s an
offensive movie for people who have lost people in the war, but we
did make a concerted effort to try to be dignified, as much as
possible in the circumstances, as far as that aspect of the movie
went. But there’s a point beyond which you can’t go: they are
zombies and they do have to get shot, and stalk people and do all the
horror movie things that people do. So, you know, it was uppermost in
our minds how we were going to portray these guys, and I think we
ultimately made them sympathetic.”
Where did you decide to
draw the line?
“Um, I don’t
remember consciously doing that. We may have. But there’s also the
pressure of making the film extremely fast and extremely cheaply. It
is only 10 days, and you don’t get another day, and you can only
have X-number of zombies -- because that’s how many we can afford
-- and you can only have X-number of bullet hits – because that’s
all we can afford – so you’re constantly working with those kinds
of strictures while also saying, ‘Well you don’t want to run this
off the rails and you don’t want to get too crazy or too campy or
too offensive, or too whatever.’ It’s a fine line. But I think it
was a line that Sam and I walked unconsciously. We didn’t really
have time to do a lot of deep thinking about it. It’s a very
intuitive kind of a movie. It really did spring from convictions. So
I think it sort of became what it became and we sort of went along
for the ride.”
I guess that nothing
you did could really be as obscene as the lies that sent the soldiers
to war in the first place.
“Well that was kind
of how we felt. When people said, ‘Don’t you think this is in bad
taste?’ we said ‘Well yes it is in bad taste. But then our actors
they come back from the dead, get shot, and then they go home for
dinner every night. And the people in Iraq who are getting shot don’t
go home for dinner every night, and I think that’s a lot worse.’”
People on
some right-wing websites have criticised you for putting
anti-war sentiments into the mouths of the dead soldiers, and said
that what you’re doing is as bad as what you’re saying the
Republicans do. How do you respond to that? Is there a significant
enough number of soldiers that are anti the war for you to
legitimately do that?
“Well there are.
Certainly John Murtha, who has gotten a lot of ink recently, for
saying that he thinks the mission is a disaster and the soldiers
should come home is being smeared and vilified. He’s a Republican,
he’s a veteran, he’s a respected guy, but as soon as you say
something about these guys that they don’t like, their initial
reaction is smear, smear, smear, and that’s what they’ve been
doing. And there are a number of soldiers who don’t feel that this
has been going well. Even people who may have thought it was a good
idea at the beginning are looking at where we are with the casualty
numbers, with the incredible cost, which, of course, we can’t
afford because we don’t have any money; we’ve given it all away
and we’re borrowing from China now. If they call in their loans I
don’t know what we’re going to do. You couldn’t run a
delicatessen the way that these people have run this country without
having the Board of Health close you down. And yet for some reason
these people are not being closed down, and I don’t understand
why.”
Over here a former
General who commanded the UN forces in Bosnia has called for the
impeachment of Tony Blair. There have also been calls
in the States for Bush’s impeachment. What are the chances of that
happening?
“Nobody takes it
seriously because the media won’t let them. The media doesn’t
want to take it seriously and they just poo-poo the whole thing. But,
you know, when I did this film there was no spying scandal. That
happened afterwards. Everything these people touch turns to shit. The
impeachable offences go way beyond their attempts to remake the
Constitution. I mean the sheer incompetence with which they’ve
botched everything they’ve touched is enough reason to get rid of
them. I think they ought to go to jail. I don’t think they should
just be impeached, I think these people are war criminals. That’s
my opinion. Other people might have a different opinion. That’s
fine. Let them go make their movie.”
How were you responding
to the news as you were writing this? Were you adding things and
taking things out as you were going along? I believe that you had the
Gold Star Mom in this before the emergence of Cindy Sheehan.
“Well Cindy Sheehan
hadn’t appeared but there was a very compelling figure in
Fahrenheit 9/11, a woman who lost her son and had been a supporter of
the war and then changed her mind, and was a real person and it was
very moving. I think she stood in for a lot of people we figured were
out there. Obviously where there are casualties there are mothers and
so we put that character in. We had no idea that within a couple of
weeks of us writing it all of a sudden Cindy Sheehan would appear and
galvanise the movement. Although speaking of smears, there’s
another character. As soon as she showed up, it was like ‘Let’s
get her.’”
Is her son and the way
they try to manipulate him in the film a nod to Jessica Lynch and the
way the military tried to use her as a symbol for their cause?
“They do use people
that way. They’re so cynical. When I introduced Homecoming in
Turin, I very glibly said, ‘Well it’s a horror movie because all
the main characters are Republicans,’ which is a cheap shot because
these Republicans aren’t the same as the Republicans I grew up
with. The word doesn’t even have the same meaning anymore. The
actions of the people in the movie are so deeply cynical, and yet I
don’t think even touch the surface of how cynical the real people
are.”
Yes, you’ve said this
is satire but when I looked at Ann Coulter’s website, there was
very little difference between what she was saying and how she
presents herself and the character Jean Cleaver in your film. For a
moment I couldn’t tell whether the site was actually hers or
something set up by someone like the Yes Men.
“See the pictures of
her in her miniskirts? That’s her website. That’s why I think in
our film we’re actually nicer to her than we really should have
been. She’s one of those strange, cartoonish, by-products of all
this -- a person that has found a way to say the most outrageous
things so that they can get more publicity for themselves. When our
character is asked if she believes all of this, she says, ‘Well,
you know, you say what you have to say.’ I don’t know whether Ann
Coulter is really as crazy as she seems or whether it’s just an
act, but either way it’s like this sort of sideshow and it makes
satire redundant.”
Exactly. When I read
her material online I thought you were spot on and there wasn’t
much exaggeration there.
“No, no, no, our
actress is more attractive, I think.”
I read there were
certain things you couldn’t do for legal reasons. Was that why you
changed the names of these characters? After all, you kill them, too.
“Not at all. I
think it’s distracting to name them after the real people. We named
them similarly to the real people but to be able to call that
character Jean Cleaver is funny. I think it’s funnier than if you
used the real name. And if you do use the real name than you really
do open yourself up to lawsuits because then you’re really putting
words in people’s mouths, and they can say, ‘I never said that
and that’s not me,’ and who needs that anyway?”
How easy was this to
cast? Were there people who were put off by the subject matter? Is
there still a fear among people of the effect that appearing in
something like this could have on their careers?
“There were some
people who we went to that didn’t want to get involved with it --
people who you would ordinarily have thought would be on the same
political page -- but they would read it and just thought ‘This is
just too controversial, there’s going to be a lot of complaints
about it and I don’t need this for my image.’ So we didn’t end
up using anybody with a big name. We just got good actors.”
Do you think what
happened to Maggie Gyllenhaal, who experienced a backlash when she
made comments about 9/11, has put people off?
“I don’t think it
helps when celebrities are vilified for what they say. I would have
thought that you could take a stand by appearing in a film like this
but I also understand the downside to it. It’s not like you’re
going to get a lot of money, and I don’t know how creatively
satisfying it is to make a movie in 10 days, and so for whatever
reasons the big names that we went to had other things to do.”
How did you and Sam
work together on the screenplay because he’s said he’d never
written a horror film before and, of course, you had?
“Well, I don’t
know, he wrote the first Batman and that was a horror flick. Sam
likes horror pictures and we had actually been kicking around some
other ideas for some scripts, and then when this came up we had a
couple of short stories we thought would make good episodes but we
couldn’t get the rights to them, and then finally time started
running out and I said, ‘Let’s just do something of our own.
Let’s do something about what’s going on. Let’s do something
that’s not werewolves and vampires, like what everybody else is
doing.’ So in relatively short order we came up with this take on
the original story, which was actually put together very quickly.”
And what did your
fellow directors think of the film?
“Um, a number of them
were in Turin and seemed to be onboard with it. A couple of them sort
of wished they’d maybe done something more substantial than the
stories that they did. But on the other hand the whole purpose of the
show was to do horror stories. Mine is actually the anomaly of the
group.”
After Fahrenheit 9/11
people on the right attacked Michael Moore for being, as they saw it,
un-patriotic and anti American.
“It’s a very
patriotic movie!”
But what kind of
reaction have you had?
“Well, it depends on
what side of the fence they’re on. If they tend to agree with you
they think it’s good. I’ve had some people agree with me
politically but think the movie is bad, and I’ve had people who
disagree with the movie politically and think that I’m the worst
director who ever lived. Which is fine with me you know? Once it’s
out there it’s out there. The trick is getting it out there.”
Because horror is still
regarded as a disreputable genre . . .
“Well that’s its
strength, actually. That’s one of the reasons its’ still around.
There are so few things that are still around that are actually
really disreputable.”
But is one drawback of
tackling a subject like this in the horror genre that the message
doesn’t perhaps gets taken as seriously as it should, because
horror is not a “legitimate” genre?
“Well, you know, I
don’t think about stuff like that. Directors make movies for
themselves. They don’t make movies for anybody else. And if they
are making movies for anybody else, they’re making a big mistake,
because you’re the audience. The trick is never to do anything that
you wouldn’t go see. If you start taking on pictures in genres you
don’t like or types of pictures that you feel above or whatever,
then you might as well stop working.”
This was never going to
screen in the Liberty Film Festival, and people on the Libertus
website were making the point that they couldn’t make a film where
they blow Howard Dean or Al Franken’s head off [Dante laughs]. But
could they?
“Well they could if
they wanted.”
Would anyone fund it?
“Would there be
anybody to see it is the real question. The Liberty film festival is
not the most well attended and popular film festival of all time.
It’s true that people on the liberal side of the fence tend to be,
I think, somewhat more artistically bent than people who aren’t.
Funding of the arts is not really a high priority for people on the
other side. What they think we think is art is a crucifix in a bottle
of urine [Andre Serrano’s “Piss Christ”], and that’s pretty
much as far as they want to go with it.”
At the heart of the
film is the question why? Why were people sent to war? Why do you
think America went to war? Are you with the people in the film seen
wearing the No Blood for Oil T-shirts? Is that the statement you’re
making?
“I’ll stand by
anything in the movie. It’s an attempt to catch a little moment in
time. I don’t know what this movie will look like in 10 years, but
that wasn’t the point. People said, ‘The going to look so dated,’
and I’m like ‘Yeah, fine.’ The point is to try and catch a
moment in time that is here now, and hopefully in a couple of years
will be different. Everything that is in there is in service of that.
Yeah, I agree with just about everything that’s in the movie. I
even believe that Republicans have consciences. The lead character
finally sees the errors of his ways. If I didn’t believe that then
I wouldn’t have a story. So it’s not all about being bad. I’d
be very curious to see what kind of a life, if any, this film will
have.”
What were your thoughts
as America started on the road to war? A lot of people fell into line
but there were . . .
“Well a lot of people
fell into line because they were lied to. Now their story is ‘Well
we didn’t tell you anything that wasn’t true.’ Well you did
leave out some pretty significant details, though. You know, after
9/11 they certainly had a carte blanche to do something. The fact
that they took out this particular guy who, for all of his evilness,
seemed to be running that part of the world in the way that part of
the world needed to be run, apparently, because it was somewhat
stable, if he didn’t have all that oil, you can’t convince me
that they would have gone in there. Why didn’t they go into North
Korea? Why didn’t they go into a bunch of other places where there
are bad guys doing bad things to people? It’s because this has all
been part of the plan. It’s part of the plan before 9/11.”
There were people who
were talking out against the administration, though, like Scott
Ritter.
“He was pretty widely
discredited. And so was everybody who was saying anything. Listen, we
have an administration that doesn’t hear what it doesn’t want to
hear. And any time that anybody has come up and said, ‘Look, this
is what is really happening and you guys should listen to me,’
they’ve been bounced out on their ear. There’s a whole raft of
people that tried to blow the whistle on these guys and got cut off
at the knees for it. That’s just not the way it works. They don’t
want to hear anything that they don’t want, and that wasn’t what
they wanted. What they wanted was, ‘This guy’s got weapons, he’s
the worst thing that ever happened, he’s going to blow us up,
little children are going to be turned into puddles of gello by this
guy and if we don’t go and get him there, he’s going to come and
do it here,’’ all that crap. So people bought it.”
It’s amazing that
people bought the democracy idea . . .
“No, no, what they
bought was a consistently different reason for going into Iraq. First
it was the weapons of mass destruction – ‘Oh, he didn’t have
any of those.’ So now it’s to bring democracy. To bring
democracy? These are the people who said they were going to dance in
the streets and throw flowers at us, you know? They didn’t do their
homework. They were told there was going to be an insurgency. They
were told how difficult it was going to be in a post-war environment
and they chose not to listen, because they just didn’t give a shit.
They figured ‘Well, we’ll just clean ‘em up.’ Now they’re
bogged down like a new Vietnam, the have no way to get out, and
they’re just constantly trying to pull the wool over people’s
eyes by changing the subject. And it pretty much works. When you’ve
got the media, and you’ve got that constant repetition day after
day after day of the same lies, then after a while people start to
think they’ve heard it so often it must be true.”
But as you remind us in
the film there was gerrymandering in Florida, possibly . . .
“Possibly? The first
time the guy didn’t even get elected, he got installed [by the
Supreme Court].”
No, I was going to say
possibly in Ohio.
“Possibly
[sneeringly]. That’s another reason: imagine how frustrating it
would be if you thought there was no way to win the election.”
Exactly. What do you
think people can do if they are effectively disenfranchised?
“In 1776 I know what
they did. I don’t know. I really don’t know. But they aren’t
going to be able to do it without the media. Somehow they’ve got to
try and get the media back.”
You’re harking back
to 1776 with the final shot of the zombie fife and drum corps
marching against the Stars and Stripes. It’s a warning and a call
to arms.
“Yeah, and it was
intentional.”
Are you in any sense
optimistic about the future of your country?
“[Laughs] No! How
could you look at that movie and say that I’m optimistic? It’s
bleak. Bleak!”
Not a lot to look
forward to then?
“Well, you know, it’s
certainly ‘May you live in interesting times.’ It is that. But I
basically see it as the dissolution of what used to be the meaning of
my country. I think that’s what I’m watching. It’s a pretty
sorry sight.”
Copyright Stephen Applebaum, 2014
